The Only Future Is Living Small

As the SHA video for the proposed redevelopment of Yesler Terrace clearly shows, standard market-driven urban thinking/planning will dominant this process...

In fact, we can now expect what we currently see in South Lake Union, a market paradise, to replace what remains of Seattle's socialist utopia.

Vulcan was tapped to be the Seattle Housing Authority’s partner on the bold $300 million redevelopment of Yesler Terrace, the city’s first public-housing project.

After interviewing and evaluating competing proposals from Vulcan and Forest City of Los Angeles, the Housing Authority board unanimously voted Tuesday to start negotiating with Vulcan.

If negotiations with Vulcan break down, the board would try to strike a deal with Forest City, as board members said they were impressed by proposals from both firms.

But a bold redevelopment of Yesler Terrace would, for one, drop all of this nonsense about "mixed-income" and focus on exploding density, increasing parks, planning safe streets for cyclists and children, and ignoring cars. How can we pack lots of people into this small area that has great access to a variety of public transportation networks, downtown, and the ID? That should be the ruling question. Instead of talking about improving the moral character of poor people by exposing them directly to the ownership values of the middle-class (the actual substance of the mixed-income discourse), we can develop a discourse of micro-living that sees something like this as one of its starting points:

At present, children are not a part of the micro-living discourse, and this is why it's not taken seriously. But if the Yesler Terrace redevelopment was not confined to the pro-market mixed-income discourse, and instead developed a program that adopted micro-living architecture and also the family values of the poor (which are far more urban than the family values of the middle-class), a whole new urbanism would be possible.

To get this delivered to your inbox, subscribe to The Stranger's Daily Slog newsletter.